Archive for April 18th, 2016

Why choosing Clinton as democratic candidate guarantees the election of Trump? There are two main reasons. The first is that Donald Trump is going to defeat Hillary Clinton. Trump, however, would be defeated by Bernie Sanders (and he knows it, hence the virulence of Trump’s attacks against Sanders).

Why would Trump defeat hillary Clinton? Just look at Hillary Clinton’s tax returns, if nothing else. In 2014, she made more than 24 million dollars, in 2015, more than twenty-seven millions. Who would not love to earn three million dollars more, from a year to the next? How did Hillary make this money? Through influence peddling, and the promise of more to come. By contrast, Bernie Sanders made less than 1% of what Clinton made.

Private (Including Corporate) Investment Versus Corporate Profits. Under Clinton-Obama-Establishment Rule, The Gap Between Monopoly Profits And Lack Of Investment In The Economy, Has Never Been So Wide. Can’t Accuse Bush, Reagan, and The Great bad Wolf Out There. The Wolf Has Been Obama’s Policy

Some will say Trump makes more than Clinton. Yes, but it’s the nature of their jobs, which differ. Donald Trump is going to accuse Clinton of corruption. Because that’s all what her immense fortune is about. When asked why he lived so modestly, ex-President Truman pointed out that, doing otherwise, using influence peddling, “would demean the office of the presidency”. And Truman was no shrinking violet: among other things, he dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (shortening considerably, by a psycho-political shock effect, a war that killed much more than 10,000 persons a day).

Trump also has favored single-payer, and, or, socialized medicine, in many declarations, for decades. He extolled the Canadian (single-payer) or Scottish (socialized) systems in the past, Hillary has declared that the richest country in the world could not afford either (differently from all other rich countries, and many, not so rich).

So Trump is going to run to the LEFT of Hillary. This is all the clearer as Trump declared, also many times that his friends in the financial industry should pay taxes at the same rate as anybody else (in particular Trump accused his friends, the hedge fund managers New York is crawling with, of getting an unfair break with “carried interest”).

Hillary, like Ted Cruz, is financed by the likes of Goldman-Sachs.

At this point, Trump is running fully on the right against the Goldman Sachs puppet who says things won’t be right “until the body of Christ rises agian”. I said in December Cruz was the true candidate of the plutocrats, and, indeed, here we are.

I used to consider, very long ago, Trump as the poster boy of what was wrong with the US banking system (long story). However, in the meantime, the Clintons got to power, and unleash the banks onto the world. The Clintons made finance so domineering that “Shadow Banks” sprouted all over.

And what of Obama, in all this. Paul Krugman himself, a strident Hillary partisan, admits, in his latest editorial, that Obama increased the powers of monopoly (in a similar vein, the New York Times admitted that Obama lowered the tax rates of the 400 richest US taxpayers by 20%, in 2009. Ironically, when I used to notice that, as it happened, I was taxed with racism, and the NYT censored my comments; this mentality of censorship of an inconvenient reality explains why said inconvenience was allowed to grow).

“ In recent years many economists, including people like Larry Summers andyours truly, have come to the conclusion that growing monopoly power is a big problem for the U.S. economy — and not just because it raises profits at the expense of wages. Verizon-type stories, in which lack of competition reduces the incentive to invest, may contribute to persistent economic weakness.

The argument begins with a seeming paradox about overall corporate behavior. You see, profits are at near-record highs, thanks to a substantial decline in the percentage of G.D.P. going to workers. You might think that these high profits imply high rates of return to investment. But corporations themselves clearly don’t see it that way: their investment in plant, equipment, and technology (as opposed to mergers and acquisitions) hasn’t taken off, even though they can raise money, whether by issuing bonds or by selling stocks, more cheaply than ever before.

How can this paradox be resolved? Well, suppose that those high corporate profits don’t represent returns on investment, but instead mainly reflect growing monopoly power. In that case many corporations would be in the position I just described: able to milk their businesses for cash, but with little reason to spend money on expanding capacity or improving service. The result would be what we see: an economy with high profits but low investment, even in the face of very low interest rates and high stock prices.”

I have, of course been saying this for years. I even saw in the root phenomenon of all this, the plutocratic phenomenon, the cause of the Fall of The Roman Republic, and thus, ultimately, of the Roman Empire.

Basically elites profit from the established order, and thus work against changing it, at all cost. Technology itself is disruptive (and, a fortiori, science), so they are limited as much as possible (while claiming to not being doing so).

So, in 2014, Paul Krugman wrote that growing importance of monopoly rents is producing a disconnect between profits and production. Is that new? No. Actually the word “rentier” was the number one class distinction in Nineteenth Century France. There was the “rentier” class, and the “working class”.

What we have here, though, is rentier monopolies. So the extent of the phenomenon is new.

Krugman:

“And such an economy wouldn’t just be one in which workers don’t share the benefits of rising productivity; it would also tend to have trouble achieving or sustaining full employment.”

What Krugman should have said here was: “quality employment”. There is plenty of employment in the USA, as there are in many a slave society. There USED to be quality employment.

Krugman: “… when investment is weak despite low interest rates, the Federal Reserve will too often find its efforts to fight recessions coming up short. So lack of competition can contribute to “secular stagnation” — that awkwardly-named but serious condition in which an economy tends to be depressed much or even most of the time, feeling prosperous only when spending is boosted by unsustainable asset or credit bubbles. If that sounds to you like the story of the U.S. economy since the 1990s, join the club.”

There are, then, good reasons to believe that reduced competition and increased monopoly power are very bad for the economy. But do we have direct evidence that such a decline in competition has actually happened? Yes, say a number of recent studies, including one just released by the White House. For example, in many industries the combined market share of the top four firms, a traditional measure used in many antitrust studies, has gone up over time.

The obvious next question is why competition has declined. The answer can be summed up in two words: Ronald Reagan.

For Reagan didn’t just cut taxes and deregulate banks; his administration also turned sharply away from the longstanding U.S. tradition of reining in companies that become too dominant in their industries. A new doctrine, emphasizing the supposed efficiency gains from corporate consolidation, led to what those who have studied the issue often describe as the virtual end of antitrust enforcement.”

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Krugman Then Dropped A Bombshell: Bad Obama

Obama, if anything, made monopoly powers greater than ever. A deer in the headlights is the charitable explanation. Here is Krugman again, suddenly coming over to the side of those who want justice, and wealth for all:

“… the Obama administration — preoccupied with the aftermath of financial crisis and the struggle with bitterly hostile Republicans — has only recently been in a position to grapple with competition policy.

Still, better late than never. On Friday the White House issuedan executive order directing federal agencies to use whatever authority they have to “promote competition.” What this means in practice isn’t clear, at least to me. But it may mark a turning point in governing philosophy, which could have large consequences if Democrats hold the presidency.

For we aren’t just living in a second Gilded Age, we’re also living in a second robber baron era.”

So Obama was the Robber Baron-In-Chief, I presume? (I am very sorry… Barry, please, tell us it ain’t so…)

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Brazil’s Standards Higher Than The US For Corruption?

The president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has been impeached. The charge? Not personal enrichment, but cheating with the numbers of the Brazilian economy when she ran again for office (and was re-elected president). Hillary Clinton is an even bigger cheater, in the category of lying with the numbers of the government. But nobody knows about it, because nobody has called her lies.

Hillary, following Obama, pretends that the banks reimbursed 800 billions of TARP money. That’s technically correct. But a lie nevertheless. The Treasury was reimbursed TARP, modulo a Quantitative Easing program of many trillions which dwarfed TARP. The Federal Reserve, another branch of government, bought Treasury Bonds, and Mortgage Securities from the banks at inflated prices (that what QE is).

Rousseff did not profit materially personally (whereas many of her accusers, about half of them, are under judicial examination for corruption!) The Clintons did, tremendously profit from the institutions they unleashed on the world.

The preceding reasonings are not too difficult: even New York democrats should be able to follow them, and even discover them, on their own.

Conclusion? All too many well-to-do New York democrats secretly, subconsciously, want to have Trump elected president.

And what is the “candidacy” most supported financially so far in these elections? Arguably the anti-Trump campaign paid by nominal Republican “PACs”’. Indeed, the Obama administration gave oodles of public money to plutocrats (in direct gifts, or taxes not perceived, or monopolies powers encouraged). Those plutocrats at the government teat want to keep it that way: that’s why their candidate is Clinton, not Trump (Cruz would be even better, because he is only a multimillionaire; not at the head of a 200 million dollar fortune as the Clintons are).

Trump has a long track record of suing the government, thus a rather adverse relationship with said government. And, whereas the likes of Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, etc. can buy simple multimillionaires, they cannot buy a multibillionaire financed by real estate such as Trump. So they detest him, and this is why the anti-Trump movement is the most financed.

I worked for Obama two years before his first election. I recognize (now!) it would have been smarter to have Clinton as president, first, before Obama (Obama was promising, but proved too naïve). I recommended Clinton for Secretary of State. I recognize it is high time to have a woman president. I even appreciate many of Hillary’s smarts, and of her neocon ways.

However, it’s disturbing to see so many democrats have embraced obsessively sheer plutocratic propaganda, against Trump, or against Sanders. Indeed, crafty propaganda accusing Trump to be a “demagogue” or “populist” has been used to smear Sanders, in the guise of smearing Trump.

So here we are: New York democrats have a real choice. If they vote Sanders, they vote for the needed revolution (at least, the revolution in perception which has to precede the revolution in legislation). If New York democrats vote for Clinton, they vote for New Pork.